NINA HALL

NINA HALL

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Author of Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local
Assistant Professor · International Relations · Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe)

Digital advocacy organizations are recognized as influential actors by the media, politicians, and some academics. In 2016, GetUp, an Australian digital advocacy organization, was named by the Australian Financial Review as one of the top ten actors with ‘covert power’ in Australia.1 Campact in Germany has powerfully mobilized public opinion against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. MoveOn was one of the ‘leading advocacy organizations’ mobilizing people against the Iraq War in the United States. Meanwhile, Leadnow, a digital advocacy organization in Canada, helped to unseat Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 Canadian federal election. This new model of advocacy organization has spread around the world. Nineteen digital advocacy organizations claim to have a total of over 20 million members. What drove the global spread of digital advocacy organizations?

ALBERTO SAVOIA

ALBERTO SAVOIA

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Google’s 1st Engineering Director · Innovation Agitator Emeritus
Author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed

As much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. I think the reason it was so successful is because innovations and new ideas, they compound. They build one upon the other. So the reason why ads was so successful for Google is because search was so successful for Google. So when you have search and you have billions of people coming in every day, maybe every hour, and searching all kinds of things, you have this treasure trove of data. If you have billion searches per day, you know how many experiments can you run? And so Google is very famous for doing a lot of A/B experiments. That's how we collect the data. So what actually enabled Google to be so successful and to grow is this mental attitude, which is the same one that Amazon and some of these really successful technology companies have, of doing a lot of experiments on small samples and continually refining their data based on that. If you're dealing with a lot of people, you can do those experiments and that's why these companies are successful. The sad thing or what happens with companies that do not operate in that way, that do not try to operate on data and do all of those experiments, those are the ones that are left behind. Innovation is experimentation.

BRUCE MAU

BRUCE MAU

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Award-winning Designer, Artist & Educator
Co-founder & CEO of Massive Change Network
Author/Co-author of Mau MC24 · The Nexus · S, M, L, XL

I would like them to know just how powerful they are, that they have the power to shape the world. At some point, I realized that the world is produced. The world is designed and produced, and since we designed and produced it, we can redesign it. And you can play a part in designing it. You can play a part in that production. It doesn't have to happen to you. And I think, for too many people, too much power and too much control is concentrated in too few hands. People need to have the power to control and design their own life.

KENT H. REDFORD

KENT H. REDFORD

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Co-author of Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology
Principal at Archipelago Consulting · Former VP for Conservation Science & Strategy, Wildlife Conservation Society

The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it. It amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.

NICK BOSTROM

NICK BOSTROM

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Founding Director of Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Philosopher, Author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

I do think though that there is a real possibility that within the lifetime of many people who are here today, we will see the arrival of transformative AI, machine intelligence systems that not only can automate specific tasks but can replicate the full generality of human thinking. So that everything that we humans can do with our brains, machines will be able to do, and in fact do faster and more efficiently. What the consequences of that are, is very much an open question and, I think, depends in part on the extent to which we manage to get our act together before these developments. In terms of, on the one hand, working out our technical issues in AI alignment, figuring out exactly the methods by which you could ensure that such very powerful cognitive engines will be aligned to our values, will actually do what we intend for them to do, as opposed to something else. And then, of course, also the political challenges of ensuring that such a powerful technology will be used for positive ends. So depending on how well we perform among those two challenges, the outcome, I think, could be extremely good or extremely bad. And I think all of those possibilities are still in the cards.

JACK HORNER

JACK HORNER

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Renowned Dinosaur Paleontologist
Technical Advisor on all Jurassic Park / Jurassic World Films

I found my first fossil when I was six years old. And I found my first dinosaur bone when I was eight, my first dinosaur skeleton when I was 13. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I didn't think there was much hope for it, though. I was doing very poorly in school. I think I was always a pretty positive kid. And so even though I wasn't doing well in school, I was really happy about the fact that I was finding all these cool fossils, and I was making collections. I don't know when it came to me that I would do this, but I think I just was born this way.